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Tokyo Film Fest: Worshiping the Golden Calf
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20090 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
1,985 Words |
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David Tracey
David Tracey is a film critic residing in Japan. |
The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) completed its fourth attempt in 1991 with at least one thing intact: its bewildering lack of identity. Bigger, slicker, and more expensive than ever, TIFF still seems to be looking for the point. Is it an upstart rival to Cannes? A new market for movies? An outlet for the lonely Asian film industry to reach the West? A mess?
Perhaps the organizers should be credited, most of all, with simply pulling it off. The 1991 version, like the three others before it, came off reasonably well despite the apparently institutional array of foul-ups. The official program, traditionally a bilingual guide to chaos, now comes with its own four-page list of small-type corrections.
Directors, distributors, and journalists meeting in the trendy Shibuya district between screenings typically traded horror stories about he official confusion. The biggest controversy this year, once again, began with the Japanese government censures, who blur out all genitalia and public hair from screen prints. Although special exceptions to the law were made for the film festival, not all of the entries escaped scrutiny. British director Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books was mauled so badly he refused to show it, and also canceled his appearance at a scheduled symposium.
Glitches aside, for 10 days Tokyo audiences were treated to a world of movies. Audiences still tended to flock to the major Hollywood releases they could see in Japan year-round anyway, but they at least had the opportunity to catch the latest from the Taiwanese New Wave, try unheralded but accomplished recent Japanese productions, and visit places they always wanted to see through small-country classics. Attendance hit a record high this year with 148,000 people.
But the film selection, a problem at every Tokyo International Film Festival since its inception in 1985, was again high on quantity and low on quality. Viewers had a large number of categories from which to choose, including two competition lists, Asian movies, current Japanese cinema, Japanese classics, women's films, and more. The barrage of movies, however, was not enough to hide the lack of significant new releases. The situation has not improved since the last Tokyo festival in 1989, when the competition jury reportedly decided that none of the films deserved a Grand Prize, and awarded one only after persuasion from the image-conscious festival organizers.
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